CHARLOTTE  "The day I take over the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, it will be the saddest day of my life, because that will mean the retirement of my father," William Franklin Graham III said in 1995. (Audio: Graham takes the pulpit)

Franklin Graham stands at the entrance of the Billy Graham Library, under construction in Charlotte.

Now comes the controversial son, who never fails to say Jesus is the only way.

Franklin Graham also called Islam "a very evil and wicked religion" after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He prayed "in Jesus' name" at President Bush's 2001 swearing-in ceremony. Both comments inspired a barrage of criticism, yet Franklin Graham never backed down.

Indeed, "don't back down" could be his second-favorite phrase after "Jesus saves."

"I'm not condemning people. God's going to do that," he says, holding up his gilt-edged black leather Bible during a long conversation on evangelism, politics and personality. "I just want to be honest with people. I just want to tell them the truth. ... People don't want to know what I have to say. They want to know what God has to say."

He's preparing for one of his biggest U.S. preaching stages yet: a Celebration of Hope this Saturday and Sunday in the wounded city of New Orleans. Billy Graham, 87, may give Sunday's sermon if his frail health permits, but Franklin, 53, will be the headliner at the New Orleans Arena.

Like all his father's crusades, this Billy Graham Evangelistic Association event will be free, created at the request of local churches. The difference is that at the ministry's trademark citywide crusades, host churches share the cost; this time, Samaritan's Purse, the humanitarian aid group Franklin has led since 1979, will share the estimated $1.7 million tab with the ministry.

Today, Franklin, who has been to the Gulf Coast five times since Hurricane Katrina, including two trips to New Orleans, is scheduled to show his father the devastation in St. Bernard Parish. Thursday, they'll pray with local pastors, and Friday they'll meet with some beneficiaries of the $38 million in aid that Samaritan's Purse raised for churches and people in the region.

He's coming to preach because the pastors' "No. 1 request" was for him to "come down here and preach the Gospel. We need it. We need the hope that comes through Christ. We need it. There's spiritual warfare going on in this city."

Franklin Graham is armed and ready "for such a time as this," as the Bible says.

No 'gift of diplomacy'

Once a rambunctious youth with a heavy hand on the throttle of any motorcycle or plane, Franklin now is a disciplined CEO with a focus as intense as his love for speed and little respect for man-made obstacles. He may never be heralded, as his father is, in a coffee-table book titled God's Ambassador.

Planning a U.S. regional pilot version of his My Hope person-to-person evangelism program already held in 14 nations.

Overseeing construction of the Billy Graham Library, financed by $25 million from private donors. "At every step you'll be confronted with an opportunity to accept Christ," so the library will be "a living crusade," Graham says.

Writing his ninth book, a children's book set in Afghanistan. It's his third kids' book.

Planning festivals (his name for crusades) in Mobile, Ala., in April; Baltimore in July; and Ecuador, Canada and Japan in the fall.

Launching an evangelism program for 10- to 13-year-olds, Dare to be a Daniel, to be run by Olympic skater and silver medalist Paul Wylie. "He's smarter than I am. He went to Harvard," Graham says.

But he inherited the penetrating green eyes, square jaw, wide smile and rangy 6-foot build. He speaks with his father's perfect diction.

And yet he's also animated by the boldness of his mother, Ruth Bell Graham, daughter of medical missionaries to China, who once locked her incorrigible older boy in the car trunk for tormenting his three sisters. When her prodigal son, the fourth of five children, was ordained in 1982, she told the assembly at Grace Community Church in Tempe, Ariz.: "Nobody's hopeless. I mean it — nobody."

Franklin says: "I have more of my mom's personality, to my favor. She's strong. She doesn't back down an inch."

He'll joke, even dish a little, off the record. He has a crinkle-eyed smile, a Johnny Cash-like taste for black (his jeans, his jackets, his pickup), a 1958 cloth-winged Piper Cub stashed at his Alaskan getaway cabin, and a sly insistence on tweaking anything too sober.

Example: The Billy Graham Library, under construction adjacent to the ministry's headquarters in Charlotte, is designed to show a farm boy's journey to global evangelism by placing the multimedia exhibits in a mock-up dairy barn.

"You've got to have some fun," Franklin says, so he has called for a talking cow that will make wisecracks about young Billy's cold hands at milking time. There's nothing in the Good Book against charm.

But he's always going to steer the conversation right back to Christ.

Franklin objects to his media image as the "exclusive" counterpart to Billy's image of "inclusion," although the only way visitors will be able to enter the library is through doors cut into a three-story glass cross on the end of the building.

"You have to go through the cross," he says, again with that crinkle-eyed smile.

"I'm not purposely trying to offend anybody" when he preaches that Jesus is the only way to heaven. He wrote a book, The Name, responding to outcries that came after his ringing call to Christ at the 1999 civic memorial for victims of the Columbine school shooting and his prayer for Bush in 2001.

Americans of every faith — and none — were accustomed to Billy Graham, who used more inclusive language at civic events, such as Lord, God, Father, than he did at crusades intended for winning souls to Christ.

Religion historian Martin Marty says Billy "never left the integrity of the Gospel but never needed to be in your face about it."

Franklin, on the other hand, is the same wherever he stands, civic podium or church pulpit, because "I stand for nothing but this," he says, Bible aloft again. "That's just how I'm wired."

Started with a global charity

After studying both the Bible and business ("so I can know what I don't know"), he took over Samaritan's Purse, then a struggling California aid agency, in 1979, a year after the death of its founder. Now one of the USA's 50 largest charities, it brings medicine, shelter and food to places abroad destroyed by war, natural disaster, disease and shattering poverty, from Sarajevo to tsunami-devastated Indonesia.

In 1993, he created Operation Christmas Child, inviting families to fill shoe boxes with presents for distribution abroad. It reached 7.3 million children in 2005. All are delivered with the message that God sends his love and the promise of salvation through Christ.

This has prompted critics, including Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, to say such religion-and-relief groups are "using their position of power to try to persuade people to leave their faith."

In his own words

On calling Islam "a very evil and wicked religion": "I said this one time. It's not my message in life. The media keep bringing it up, not me. But I haven't backed down either, and I see it the way I see it."

On politicians: "I try to avoid them." That doesn't include his longtime friend Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a physician who has flown medical missions with Franklin Graham.

On HIV/AIDS: "Every human being has a soul and every soul is precious to God, and if God is concerned about HIV/AIDS, don't you think we should be?"

On growing older: "Am I ready to stand before a Holy God? What will it take? People say, 'Oh, if I'm good, God will take me (to heaven) or if I give to good causes, I'll go.' But that's not what the Bible teaches."

Franklin Graham says he is unabashedly seeking souls, but no one is ever denied services for turning away from the message.

With his focus overseas, he flew under the American religious radar for years. Few mused about "the next Billy Graham" while the original still roamed the globe, says William Martin, Rice University sociology professor and author of A Prophet with Honor: The Billy Graham Story.

But as his father began to feel the onslaught of age, bone-breaking falls and symptoms related to Parkinson's disease, Franklin Graham became more visible. In 1995, he published his autobiography, Rebel with a Cause, detailing his turning from smoking, drinking and youthful defiance to a life serving the Lord.

In 2000, he became CEO of his father's ministry, and, in 2002, its president. Last year, he uprooted the ministry from Minneapolis, where it was founded in 1950, to Charlotte, where Billy was born.

The new headquarters, styled like a massive stone and wood mountain lodge, is 90 miles from Boone, N.C, home base for the Samaritan's Purse offices. It's also near the log cabin in Montreat, where Franklin grew up and where his parents still live, and the 1865 frame house where Franklin and his wife, Jane Austin Cunningham Graham, reared their four children.

William Franklin IV, 31, is a pastor who, as his father once did, is starting to hold small city crusades. Roy, 29, works in operations at the ministry. Edward, 26, a West Point graduate and an Army Ranger, is an Iraq veteran about to ship out on another tour, destination undisclosed. Jane Austin, 19, nicknamed Cissie, studies at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University.

"I'm sure they've struggled with the Graham name, but they know how to stand their ground," he says. He didn't make peace with it himself until he was 22, on his knees in a Jerusalem hotel room one night, turning his life over to God.

The family prays at a country church near Boone, one of several Christian institutions and causes to which Franklin Graham tithes 10% of his gross income from two salaries and some minor royalties from his eight books. He donates more than $41,000 a year, says his spokesman, Jeremy Blume.

This year, he'll be paid $230,597 plus $75,000 for housing from Samaritan's Purse, which has a 2006 budget of $264 million. An additional $108,000 salary comes from the ministry's $110 million budget.

It has taken Franklin two years to align the two organizations' policies and procedures. Now, he says, "I want to do the same thing my father has done, but do it for more people than he did."

Already, Franklin says, "in 2004 and 2005, we saw more conversions than any time in the history of the organization, more than the last 60 years combined."

Franklin says the ministry accepted more than 3.2 million decisions for Christ. He has done it with a new model for crusades that he calls My Hope. Instead of his father's massive rallies in a stadium, auditorium or park, it's organized to reach people where they live.

New face of conversion

For My Hope India, the ministry trained 1.3 million believers — ordinary people willing to testify to their personal faith — then bought 150 hours of TV time over six days in 51 markets. They filmed local evangelists and entertainers in 14 languages and dubbed in a Billy Graham sermon for each market.

Then 800,000 of the volunteers each invited 10 friends home to watch the telecasts together, receive Gospel literature and fill out their "decisions cards" for Christ in their own language. So far: 1.9 million decision cards in India alone. My Hope crusades have run in 16 other countries.

By Robert Deutsch, USA TODAY

Billy Graham is helped to the stage by his son Franklin in New York in June.

"We're going places where they have never heard God loves them," Franklin says.

If people who follow other religions or call themselves spiritual or secular don't agree with his message or his methods, Franklin Graham is unconcerned. He sees sin as a blight without borders, beyond time. "Man's heart is the same everywhere. It's evil. It's wicked. The human soul is a putrid sore of greed, lust and pride."

People forget, he adds, that his father once had plenty of punch. Billy once decked a man who threatened the family on their doorstep. He criticized the British Labor Party so sharply that in the 1950s, some members of Parliament wanted to bar his entry.

Franklin recounts how his father was berated for hobnobbing with politicians and for failing to protest the Vietnam War.

What the son omits but others point out:

• His father moved away from fundamentalist doctrines decades ago. Some deeply conservative Christians still are outraged that Billy Graham welcomed Catholics and liberal Protestant churches to partner in crusades and that he didn't dish out hellfire to non-Christians, Martin says.

• When Billy was Franklin's age, he was hanging out with Richard Nixon after a prayer breakfast in 1972, saying, "Yes, sir" to the president's remarks about Jews having a dangerous "stranglehold" on the media. When the Nixon tapes were released in 2002, the aged evangelist did not recall his own words, but he apologized abundantly and quickly.

Martin calls the son "more progressive" than his father in social action and says Samaritan's Purse is one of the most impressive social service agencies in the world. He also notes that Franklin was first to push evangelicals to confront HIV and AIDS by organizing a national forum in 2002.

But, "theologically, Franklin is more conservative, more outspoken and, frankly, blunt," he says. "He'll say more provocative things and feels no need to apologize."

Franklin says he has mellowed. On temporal matters, "I back down all the time. ... I have a great reverse gear. I can go backward just about as fast as I can go forward. But I'll never back up on the Bible."